(PRNewswire) — Altera Corporation (NASDAQ:
ALTR) today announced third quarter sales of $445.9 million, up 6 percent from the second quarter of 2013 and down 10 percent from the third quarter of 2012. Third quarter net income was $119.4 million, $0.37 per diluted share, compared with net income of $101.5 million, $0.31 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2013 and $157.5 million, $0.49 per diluted share, in the third quarter of 2012.

Year-to-date cash flow from operating activities was $459.4 million. Altera repurchased approximately 161 thousand shares of its common stock during the quarter at a cost of $5.3 million.

Altera's board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per share, to be paid on December 2, 2013 to stockholders of record on November 12, 2013.

"Sales improved from second quarter levels, with our new products, led by our 28 nm FPGAs, as growth leaders. We expect this new product growth momentum to carry over into the December quarter," said John Daane, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board. "We have taped out our first Stratix 10 test chip, which will be manufactured on Intel's 14 nm FinFET process. Coupling this process with our next generation architectural innovations produces a substantial step up in performance and density from our current FPGAs and offers compelling benefits to our customers versus competitive offerings."

Altera and Micron Technology, Inc. have jointly demonstrated successful interoperability between Altera Stratix® V FPGAs and Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC). This new capability will be delivered with Altera's Generation 10 portfolio, which includes both Stratix 10 and Arria®10 FPGAs and SoCs.
HMC addresses the limitations imposed by conventional memory technology, and provides ultra-high system performance with significantly lower power-per-bit. HMC delivers up to 15 times the bandwidth of a traditional DDR3 module and uses 70 percent less energy and 90 percent less space than existing technologies.

Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs will be the first device families deployed in the
Generation 10 portfolio and will be the first devices to support HMC technology in volume production. Leveraging an enhanced architecture optimized for TSMC's 20 nm process, Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs will use HMC to extend the device families' performance benefits of both 15 percent higher core performance than today's highest performance Stratix V FPGAs and up to 40 percent lower power compared to the lowest power Arria V midrange FPGAs.

Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs will enable the most advanced, highest performance applications across communications, military, broadcast and compute and storage markets. These high-performance applications often require the highest memory bandwidth, which drives the need for an HMC-ready architecture. Leveraging Intel's 14 nm Tri-Gate process and an enhanced high-performance architecture that integrates with HMC technology, Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs will enable system solutions with an operating frequency over one gigahertz, and two times the core performance of current high-end 28 nm FPGAs. Stratix 10 devices also will allow customers to achieve up to a 70 percent reduction in power consumption at performance levels equivalent to Altera's previous generation.

Altera is now shipping production-qualified Cyclone® V SoCs and engineering samples of its Arria V SoCs. These devices benefit from density, architectural, productivity and processor performance leadership, which enables Altera SoCs to target a very wide range of applications. In addition,Altera SoCs provide embedded developers with the highest productivity development tools. Featuring increased processor peak clock frequencies, these devices are the FPGA industry's highest performing SoCs. Altera offers the industry's broadest range of densities with its 28 nm SoCs, ranging from 25K logic elements (LE) up to 460K LE. This density range allows Altera SoCs to be integrated into a variety of embedded systems, ranging from cost-sensitive industrial automation and automotive driver assist systems to applications that require higher-performance, including remote radio units, 10G/40G line cards and broadcast studio equipment.

Altera is collaborating with the China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI) to develop next-generation wireless networks based on the Centralized Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture. By centralizing the baseband processing of a large geographical area into the cloud, the cloud-based C-RAN architecture enables operators like China Mobile to reduce deployment and operating costs for their next-generation wireless infrastructure. Altera and CMRI are working together to debug and verify next-generation wireless systems based on the C-RAN architecture by leveraging Altera's FPGA technology. Collaborating with the world's largest cellular operator on C-RAN architecture development enables Altera to more effectively align its FPGAs, software and IP to meet next-generation wireless infrastructure requirements.